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  • RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT

Soft robot takes cues from a sea slug’s swimming stroke

A robot made from gel bends in response to light, allowing for a wide variety of motions.
Light-fueled crawling, walking, jumping, and swimming of shape-programmable liquid crystal gels under water.

A beam of light prompts a gel strip to bend, causing the strip to flap upwards through a column of water (video is faster than real time). Credit: H. Shahsavan et al./PNAS

With a pulse of light, a slim strip of soft gel comes alive underwater and crawls, jumps and swims against the water’s drag.

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Nature 579, 11 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00563-x

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